“Dolby’s 12 Days of Soundgarden: Day 5 (Dismantling the Absurd Notion That Audioslave is of Any Importance Whatsoever in the Scope of Chris Cornell’s Alternative Rock Career)”

Well, dear reader, you probably think I’m weird by now. With me doing all these Soundgarden posts in a row, vesting this much importance in their strange, often sadistic music, you might be thinking, this guy probably like spends all day at the gym, then goes home and doesn’t even drink or smoke, just performs bizarre rituals and harmful on gerbils. Well, I’ll have you know, they’re guinea pigs, to be exact.
What it boils down to, of course, by the long and short of it, is that god da** I’m just showing my age. In fact, I thought about listing like a typical mix CD I would have made as a soon-to-be-senior-in-high-school in the summer of 2001, as a way of showing my overall music taste with Soundgarden in tandem, but (a.) to an extent that’s already apparent to any reader of this site, and (b.) I’ve come to the sad realization that nobody cares. You guys just want hair, and noise. Da** visual un-learners.
So Rage against the Machine was pretty big. Well, guess what. I hate ‘em. Can’t stand ‘em. Let’s see: they’re supposed to have retired upon the albeit fairly exciting Battle of Los Angeles (I’m not counting that crap covers album they put out), they sit tacit the entire G.W. Bush admin. while he’s bombing innocent Iraqis, and then Hillary Clinton comes around and they act like she’s some evil entity. I’ve even heard this one bootleg wherein Zach de la Rocha calls Bill Clinton a “Dixiecrat” and a “punk.” I’m guessing this has to do with his three strikes and you’re out policy and his corporate deregulation; the former he’s already publicly apologized about [1] and the latter was necessary to facilitate Internet commerce — something about delimiting the amount of domiciles one corporation can own. So yeah, I guess Zach de la Rocha just feels PASSIONATE about race-irrespective criminal justice and anti-monopoly market regulations. Well, we all have our avocations.
And that’s just what Audioslave was for Chris Cornell, whereas many young kids (damn kids!) these darn days seem to think that it was his main band, which would render it a “vocation.” No. Actually, Soundgarden, his first band which infiltrated the primary grunge movement and went on to sell somewhere around 15 million records in total, started earlier than a lot of people realize — somewhere around 1985. This would be essentially a full decade before they’d reach their popular apex. In fact, they basically invented grunge, as is detailed in the great documentary Hype! [2] (which you might have discovered by me beating you over the head through my computer with a frying pan in every post I write on this site). Soundgarden’s early stuff is not nearly as popular — it’s nowhere near as melodic as they’d eventually become. [3] I suspect the increase in musical complexity may have something to do with some heroin use on the part of some unnamed (never named) Soundgarden singer who just passed away, especially given that he’s got what Billie Joe Armstrong might describe as an “angel face” on the “Nothing to Say” cover. The evolutions of Soundgarden, though, are only unapparent to the thick-headed and the history-ignorant.
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[1] http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/03/21/bernie-hillary-and-the-new-democratic-party.
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[2] Producer Jack Endino describes engineering the band’s 1987 single “Nothing to Say” and thinking something like, “This is way too good to be some little Seattle band.”
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[3] I remember Chris Cornell made some quote about this strange phenomenon for 2002’s Rolling Stone Readers’ Poll Top 100 Albums of all time, but intriguingly, all I can find in searches are transcriptions of the order of albums, without the extensive writeups which had originally accompanied each.